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The boundary between Lancashire and West Yorkshire lies in moorland country. In both counties there are Methodist chapels in Pennine villages of black gritstone terraced cottages , once the homes of
hand-loom weavers. On the proximate slopes , grazing sheep wander among the ruins of scattered hill farms and huddle behind reservoir walls. The moors themselves are an upland wilderness of peat , sphagnum
moss , heather and cotton grass in summer , spindrift-covered ice-dunes in winter. Often shrouded in mist or cloud , they present a strange and forbidding aspect to the casual visitor , particularly on the
frequent days when they're swept by moaning winds and driving rain. To hiking devotees they offer an atmospheric appeal akin to that of deserted settlements for dreamers of a distant past.
In the 1950s Ted Hughes brought his American wife Sylvia Plath
to visit his home town of Mytholmroyd in the Calder valley. During that stay she wrote a number of poems inspired by their walks on the moors :
There is no life higher than the grass tops
Or the hearts of sheep , and the wind
Pours by like destiny , bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention , they will invite me
To whitening my bones among them.
This proved prophetic after her suicide in 1963 , when Ted buried her in Heptonstall graveyard. This hamlet above Hebden Bridge has become a tourist attraction known for for its nineteenth century ambience. Only eight or nine miles away from it is the foremost tourist venue
in this part of the world , the village of Haworth. Here is the Bronte Parsonage and all the other commemoratives of the money-spinning reputations
of those scribbling sisters of nineteenth century fiction. Take a literary pilgrimage back in time , from Plath's gravestone (regularly disturbed by twentieth century feminists protesting Ted's role before her suicide)
, across the intervening moors to the Haworth vault in which all the Bronte family bones lie. Your moorland ramble takes you past the roofless , skeletal remains of Top Withens , reputedly the Wuthering Heights of Emily's classic novel (itself the inspiration for Kate Bush's hit song). In its eighteenth century heyday this must have been a house of considerable wealth , as its dressed stone buttresses and mullion
window spaces still suggest …. but now only sheep and ghosts of the past find shelter here.
At the conclusion of Emily's one and only novel , Cathy offers a suitable postscript to Sylvia's ruminations as she “listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass , and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet
slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” For sensitive souls like Sylvia and Emily , the moors may have seemed like a terrestrial version of the vast emptiness of outer space – an appropriate background to our tenuous
hold on individual life. Roman roads and Anglo-Saxon packhorse routes traversed them before the Enclosures transformed them into the privately-owned lands they remained until the later twentieth century. What higher purpose
lay behind those confiscations of common land ? Evidence is to be found in the form of regular lines of shooting butts for rich men to crouch in , armed with the shotguns that remind the plump , flapping grouse of their
tenuous hold on individual life.
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20th November 2013
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